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Success And Your
Children
How to Make Sure Your Children Become More Successful Than You
By Jamie Friedlander
Like many
parents, financial adviser Dennis Ryan has two daughters with starkly different
personalities.
Emma, 18, is introverted and intellectual, and she hated competitive
sports as a young child. “She was the kid in left field with the glove
on her head picking dandelions,” he says.
Annie, 15, is the polar opposite: She’s incredibly social, a leader
among her friends and always glued to her cellphone. “She never wants
to miss a single text or Instagram post,” Ryan says.
He has
paid close attention to his daughters’ contrasting personalities as they’ve
grown older.
He
inspired Emma to participate in the Latin club and charity work, while he
encouraged Annie to take advantage of what he calls her “gift of gab” by using
her popularity to be a positive leader among her friends.
Ryan’s parenting style is a prime example of what Lea Waters, Ph.D.,
head of the Positive Psychology Centre at the University of Melbourne, calls
strength-based parenting: an approach to parenting in which “parents
place more of their focus and energy on the strengths, talents and positive
qualities of their children, as compared to focusing their time and energy
on fixing the faults, flaws and weaknesses in
their kids.”
Strength-based
parenting — which is fueled by the concepts of positive psychology — is still
in the nascent stages of research, but many parents already do it
subconsciously.
Waters
says the handful of scientific studies on the topic have shown it can help
children become more successful as adults.
Other
valuable parenting techniques for raising well-rounded children include
stressing the importance of soft skills, teaching children that failure is
acceptable and inevitable, defining more broadly what it means to be smart and
using the concepts of positive psychology to help children be happier.
Waters
says most people were raised to believe the best way to improve a child is to
fix what is wrong with him or her, when instead we should focus on nurturing
his or her inherent strengths.
Johnny
isn’t good at math? Don’t drill it into him 24/7. Instead build on his natural
talent for language by encouraging him to write short stories.
In attempting to fix our children’s’ flaws, Waters says, we think
we’re doing the right thing, when instead “whether you mean it or not,
you’re consistently and constantly telling your child, You’re not good
enough. You are impatient. You don’t have good social skills. You’re
uncoordinated.”
Instead
of fixing the negative qualities, improve upon your child’s naturally strong
character strengths, such as kindness, grit, creativity and leadership.
The New
Smart
Although
strength-based parenting is imperative for raising conscientious, well-adjusted
children, most parents also want their children to be considered smart.
They want
their children to flourish and fare better than they did — to score better on
the SATs, to land a better job than they did, to go on to make more money than
they do.
Although
raising children to be intelligent is crucial, it’s not enough.
In
today’s world, with so much competition for quality jobs and other jobs giving
way to technology, prospective employers want candidates who are creative, deep
thinkers, too.
Happiness,
grit, creativity, communication, courage and critical thinking are arguably
more important for developing your child’s intelligence than being able to name
the capitals of every state.
“It can’t be that everything can be reduced to your score on a
narrowly construed bubble test,” says
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science
Tells Us About Raising Successful Children.
“It has to be that success means more than just preparing our children
in reading, writing and math.”
We need
to redefine the word smart, says Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, co-author of Becoming
Brilliant. “While you want your children to do well in school, it’s
not enough. We want parents to know there is nothing wrong with wanting your
kids to be successful personally and to have happy and well-adjusted lives.”
Important
as it might be, being considered smart won’t necessarily mean a child goes on
to have a happy, well-adjusted adult life.
“Education
means not cramming people with meaningless facts they regurgitate in exams,” said Sir Anthony Seldon, one of the leading proponents of
positive psychology, at the International Positive Education
Network’s (IPEN) inaugural Festival
of Positive Education held this past July.
“Transformative, real education is about drawing out what is inside —
those multiple attitudes and intelligences.”
Traditionally
called soft skills, abilities such as communication, teamwork, adaptability and
time management are just as important to a child’s success in school and life
as anything else, Hirsh-Pasek says.
“I’m trying to put a bullet through hard and soft skills,” she says, “because I think rather than demeaning some of
these skills that are so important and so foundational, we should begin to
understand that there really is a breadth of skills all kids need if they’re
going to succeed and be happy kids in the present and then be good,
collaborative, thinking, smart people in the future.”
Learning
to Fail
One of the most prevalent problems plaguing today’s society is our
“one-answer culture,” Golinkoff says, because when children fail, “they
really fail.”
A
dyslexic child may do dismally on the SATs and be deemed unintelligent, when in
fact he or she may exhibit some of the character strengths inherent in dyslexic
people, such as creativity and high emotional intelligence.
We need
to teach children that there are multiple ways to be smart.
Hirsh-Pasek stresses the importance of allowing young children to
tinker and explore, because in exercising their creativity, “one of our
kids might just develop the next iPad or the cure for cancer.”
In
teaching children to fail, we can also allow them to hone in on their unique
skill set.
Children
start out with an I-can-do-anything attitude in preschool, Golinkoff says, and
if they don’t grow out of this phase, they won’t develop their specific talents
and skill sets.
Don’t
tell your daughter she’s a natural swimmer if she’s not. Instead, try to
strengthen her natural gift for leadership or compassion.
The
Happiness Factor
Catering
to your child’s character strengths, teaching him or her how to fail and instilling in your child the
skills necessary to be intelligent in today’s society are all important.
But the
most important quality, the most necessary component for raising a child, is
ensuring he or she is happy.
Raising
children with the tenets of positive psychology and developing their happiness
at all times is the secret weapon for effective parenting.
“Having a positive mindset is one of the
greatest competitive advantages we can give somebody,” positive psychologist Shawn Achor, “The Happiness Guy” for SUCCESS,
said at IPEN’s Festival of Positive Education.
“I think we’re afraid of happiness as a society,” he says. People think if they’re too happy, they won’t be hungry
enough for success.
But by
positively supporting children during the learning process, they can reach
higher levels of happiness and in turn be more successful in school.
He says
one way we can help our children is by shifting the thought process from If
I work harder, I’ll be more successful and I’ll be happier to If
I’m happy, I’ll work harder and I’ll be more successful.
At the
end of the day, we cannot prevent the inevitable failures and setbacks our
children will face. But we can arm them with the tools to remain resilient no matter what happens.
“We
cannot help our children from bad things happening to them,” Seldon says.
“Bad things will happen to us in our lives. But if we do these things —
if we give young people the best possible character, education, virtue, skills
and positive psychology approaches — it will give them the optimal chance to be
able to cope with it.”
This article
originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
Jamie Friedlander is a freelance writer
based in Chicago and the former features editor of SUCCESS magazine.
Her work has been published in The Cut, VICE, Inc., The Chicago
Tribune and Business Insider, among other publications. When she's
not writing, she can usually be found drinking matcha tea into excess,
traveling somewhere new with her husband or surfing Etsy late into the night.
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